CR Drost

My name is Chris. I was born in Ithaca, NY, and studied biomechanical engineering and engineering physics there at Cornell, before getting my M.Sc. Applied Physics from the TU Delft in the Netherlands. I am here because I love people and I want them to excel.

Most of the ideas in my answers are carefully crafted, and where they explode in complexity it is usually because I don't know a less-complex way to fully express the point. There are usually short-hand steps in the middle that I use may run over your head. If you're reading this for any reason, please feel free to ask me in comments to "dumb down" these sorts of details; and I will do my best. There are usually easier ways to explain special cases and stuff.

So, for example, the work-energy theorem can be worked out, in a limited sense, with plain middle-school algebra: but if you know vectors and calculus, the "differential" form (P = dK/dt) is much easier and clearer to start with, and the work-energy theorem is just the time-integral of that. So I will tend towards the "easy/clear" version with vectors and calculus: but if you don't know vectors and calculus, you're going to miss out! If you are reading this because that has happened, ask me in comments for the lower-skill-level explanation, and I will try to give you that middle-school algebra version.

(But, for your own good, learn vectors and calculus. It is a tragedy that people try to teach physics without some "0th-year-course" on those topics. In fact college courses seem to reteach the same stuff year after year at all skill levels, just because they don't want to set aside a prerequisite freshman course on the subject to teach it to everyone together.)